reditblog

Towards the end of 2015 Intel's new server chip the Xeon D became available so i picked up a Supermicro board with one of these to build as a FreeNAS server. It turns out they are perfect for a small FreeNAS build as you get enterprise grade hardware at a good price and a board that supports plenty of RAM for ZFS to use. Supermicro also have Mini-ITX configurations so it can all be crammed into a nice small case.

I had previously run Arch Linux as a virtual host. While it did mean I had the features of the latest kernel and QEMU releases, the number of updates and stability issues a rolling release distro like Arch brings was a problem. With the more stable distros now having the features I wanted a couple ...

Having had to setup and manage a lot of Windows Workgroup clients recently i noticed that without Group Policy this becomes a pain pretty quickly. It is also becoming more common run a Workgroup network as small businesses ditch their servers for cloud services. As an excuse to write some Powershell i wrapped the most common changes i was making into a module ...

Powershell by default provides access to the registry via a PSProvider. Running Get-PSDrive shows this, the namespace HKCU and HKLM are available along with the defaults for the local file system and other locations. As of Powershell 4.0 the registry PSProvider can only access a registry hive that is already loaded into the currently logged on profile, it is not possible ...

There are a number of ways to connect virtual machines together, all of them make use of a Linux bridge device (a virtual switch) which is controlled with the brctl command. The bridge can be left isolated so only VMs on the same host can communicate, or joined to a physical LAN and pass traffic at either Layer 2 ...

This tutorial will cover installation and basic configuration of libvirt and QEMU to a state where it's possible to easily provision new VMs with WebVirtMgr. It will be a minimalist install with as few dependencies as possible to keep the host easy to maintain. WebVirtMgr is not perfect, but is the best lightweight web GUI around at the moment. See the GitHub page for ...